Traditionally, in some cases, activation and termination of a home electronic apparatus installed in a house is controlled by remote operations requested by respectively activation and termination commands received from a remote control device as commands to activate the home electronic apparatus and terminate the operation of the home electronic apparatus as described in documents such as the following patent references:
Patent reference 1: JP-2000-59867A
Patent reference 2: JP-2002-78047A
An example of the remote operations is reservation of video recording of a TV program in a video deck.
In the remote control executed as described above to activate and terminate a home electronic apparatus, normally, the home electronic apparatus is activated and driven by power supplied from a commercial power supply through a commercial plug as operation-driving power. Thus, the power consumption of the home electronic apparatus has a negligible effect on other apparatus.
In a parked vehicle, on the other hand, in order to keep the inside of a vehicle at a proper temperature at a time the user gets in the vehicle in advance, for example, a technique is devised to automatically activate an onboard air conditioner at an activation time set in advance by the user. An air conditioner activated automatically in this way may conceivably be terminated when the user gets in the vehicle or when the user returns to the vehicle. When long time lapses before the user gets in the vehicle or before the user returns to the vehicle, however, the actual temperature of the inside of the vehicle may become much different from a set temperature, and such a big difference due to the lapse of the long time actually entails a large load borne by the air conditioner. Such a large load in turn increases the power consumption of the air conditioner. Since the air conditioner is driven to operate by power supplied as operation-driving power from an onboard vehicle battery having limited accumulated electric charge, it is likely that the battery will run out of accumulated electric charge.
In order to solve the problem, a configuration is conceived as a measure for coping with such a situation. In the conceived configuration, the operation of the air conditioner is forcibly terminated on condition that an onboard radio apparatus has received a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus from a remote control apparatus. In such a configuration, by giving a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus to the onboard radio apparatus from the remote control apparatus, the operation of the air conditioner can be terminated forcibly even when the user does not get in the vehicle or the user does not return to the vehicle. Thus, the possibility that the onboard battery will run out of accumulated electric charge can be avoided in advance.
In the configuration described above, however, it is assumed that the onboard radio apparatus is capable of receiving a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus from the remote control apparatus and that the remote control apparatus is capable of transmitting a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus to the onboard radio apparatus. When the onboard radio apparatus is not capable of receiving a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus from the remote control apparatus or the remote control apparatus is not capable of transmitting a command to terminate the operation of the onboard apparatus to the onboard radio apparatus, however, it is difficult to forcibly terminate the operation of the air conditioner. As a result, the configuration raises a problem of putting the user in a difficult situation such as a situation in which the onboard battery runs out of accumulated electric charge, the engine cannot be started and/or a theft notification signal cannot be transmitted to a central office.